This bundle of 11 videos educates everyone working within fire and rescue services about a wide variety of workplace behaviours, such as harassment, sexual harassment, bullying and discrimination.

THE FIRST THREE VIDEOS are geared towards everyone working in fire and rescue services because there are unique aspects to your workplace. Within these videos, Stephen discusses a number of real Canadian cases from a variety of workplaces and then focuses on cases just from Canadian fire departments.

for... City of Leduc Firefighters

Objective:To give Company Officers and Management within Canadian fire and rescue services education and common sense tools to create a healthy working environment by preventing and responding to inappropriate workplace behaviours, including harassment, bullying & discrimination.

THE NEXT THREE VIDEOS are geared towards Company Officers and Management in fire and rescue services. These 3 videos come from a webinar series geared towards fire leaders and cover about85% of the same content as the first three videos. However, if your audience is strictly Company Officers and/or Management, these 3 recordings may be just unique enough to help your workplace leaders.

THE FINAL FIVE VIDEOS are cases from a variety of Canadian workplaces, with an emphasis on male-dominated ones. These will help your fire leaders learn from the mistakes of others and do a better job of creating a respectful workplace.

Whether you’re responding to a workplace incident, or you want to be pro-active with your supervisors, these videos will help your workplace prevent and respond to incidents of harassment, bullying, discrimination and other inappropriate workplace behaviours.

Either as a stand-alone, or as an addition to the videos noted above, you can show one or more of the case videos. Just as judges, adjudicators and arbitrators use cases from all across Canada, these cases come from various places. Therefore, unless you need something particularly unique for your Canadian jurisdiction, all of these cases should work for your learning objectives. These cases include:

#7. When workplace “sexual” pranks go too far. This wrongful dismissal case from B.C. lets employees and supervisors know that when their workplace becomes too “sexualized” in what may seem light and humourous, it can lead to some employees taking things too far. There are especially lessons for supervisors in this case, including the importance of listening to employees before you come to a decision what discipline you take. Your supervisors don’t need to learn about investigations to appreciate the many things that went wrong by management. All employees can learn that you can still have a fun workplace, but there are lines which shouldn’t be crossed…for fear of ending up in court. 10:58

#9. When an employee is labelled a “troublemaker.” This human rights case from B.C. helps supervisors to stay away from labelling people. Instead they will be encouraged to look at the performance of an employee through new lens each time an issue arises. The unfortunate aspect of this case is how supervisors became entrenched in their views of this woman, when she was just bringing forward legitimate concerns of discrimination based on her gender. This case isn’t just about gender/sex discrimination, it’s about taking as much bias out of our decision making as possible. Your supervisors will be encouraged to form their own opinions of employees, instead of just taking the word of others…and then getting into big and expensive (this one very expensive) trouble. 11:06

#11. When the bully is the manager. This wrongful dismissal case from Ontario is not only significant, but it got a lot of press at the time. We don’t expect one of the largest companies in the world to get caught being so wrong and doing so much damage to an employee (who was a supervisor). And don’t be fooled by the appeal court substantially reducing the financial penalties, because the end result was one of the highest awards from Canadian courts for this kind of inappropriate workplace behaviour (seems the original jury was thinking more of American decisions). This case will help anyone in your management line to know that if caught, bullies can cost a workplace a fortune…not just in money, but in time lost dealing with the lawyers and everyone else. 12:36

#12. Discipline due to social media postings. This labour arbitration case from Ontario has the important message of being careful what you post on social media, but for supervisors, it has another message…even more important. This employer wanted to be firm with postings from three employees and the end result seems rather logical for two of them. But for the third one – who this case was about – it came down to the previous inappropriate actions of one of their managers. The employee ended up with a very severe form of discipline, but not as severe as the company wanted, due to the manager’s previous behaviour. The message comes through loud and clear: if you want to hold employees to a high standard, your supervisors better be exhibiting that same high standard. 11:49

#17. When violence happens outside work. This Manitoba labour arbitration case deals with a very different off-duty conduct: violent behaviour. Many times people feel they can get away with a wide-variety of behaviours as long as they do it on their own time. Often that’s true, but not always. Your learning objective may include workplace violence, or it could just be off-duty conduct, or both. This case is also a bit different because it involves two women, when we often attribute this kind of behaviour to men. As well, this case adds the element of how much evidence do you have to bring forward to take decisive action. It’s not an episode of Law and Order, but because so many people get their understanding of the law from TV programs, it will help them understand these issues can be real and consequences can be great. 10:52

For each of these videos, Stephen has written up “Lesson suggestions,” helping you with ideas and even questions to help you deliver stress-free in-house training. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel, but you are strongly encouraged to add the important elements of your workplace policies, procedures and most of all, culture. Supervisors and managers especially will appreciate the added education.

These videos can be shown on a computer, linked from a computer to a TV or to a digital projector.